Note: I am 37 years old. I gave birth to my first child as a (pre-tenure) 5th-year assistant professor and am pregnant with my second as a (tenured) associate professor. The experiences and opinions I share are my own, coming from the perspective of someone who has been pregnant, given birth, breast-fed, and raised children with the support of a spouse and family members. I recognize that they may differ substantially from those of others, including due to structural and systemic biases and vast differences in access to support and resources. I hope for this post to be informative both about my own experiences and the programs available to support these important life transitions, however they look for each individual, while recognizing the many limitations in the existing social support system for parents.
This post is part of our blog series The Unwritten Curriculum. Check out our posts in this series: How to apply to grad school (en Español), The grad student life, How to submit a paper, Demystifying the qualifying exams, How to do a remote postdoc, How to apply for a tenure track faculty job in ecology, Paths to ecology I, II, III, IV, and V, How to prepare for a faculty job interview, How to give a great (job) talk, and Navigating mental health resources at Stanford.
At 39 weeks pregnant with my second child, the last thing left on my to-do list is to write a blog post about having babies as a tenure-track professor. The fraught topic of having children while in academia is often discussed, but for me (and for colleagues and trainees I’ve talked with about this) it has been very helpful to hear about first-person experiences and to share strategies for protecting time to bond with the baby and recover from birth while also ensuring a smooth and productive return to a full-time career. The goal of this post is to pay that forward as best I can.
TL; DR:
1. Plan ahead to accomplish key tasks before going on leave
2. Think about how to maintain lab culture
3. Say no to non-essential commitments
4. Apply for grant supplements
One defining feature of becoming a parent is the loss of control over aspects of your life that you’re used to controlling. I have found the world champion women’s ultimate frisbee team Fury’s mantra, “CC the C: consciously control the controllable,” to be some of the most helpful advice.
As a grad student and postdoc, I heard a lot of advice about having babies that ranged from unhelpful to downright sexist: there’s never a good time; pregnancy doesn’t exactly make you smarter; your life will never be the same; no one is more bitter than women who waited too long and missed out on having kids; people don’t take pregnant women and new mothers seriously professionally. At the time I tended to shrug it off because it all seemed so far off (I was still in my twenties!), and the tradeoffs involved in having children and a career seemed manageable with resources and support that I thought were readily available (daycare, a supportive spouse, parental leave). But when the time came to think about getting pregnant, I found it all daunting, and mainly for the wrong reasons (e.g., I worried about impacts of nausea and hormones during pregnancy on my productivity, which are relatively short-lived compared to what can happen before and after).
People in academia talk a lot about the challenges of having kids and not enough about the joy. My experience has been quite the opposite of all that doom-and-gloom advice: pregnancy, childbirth, and being a parent have mainly been joyful, expansive, life-enriching experiences that I couldn’t imagine living without. Which is not to say that it has been easy. Getting pregnant took a lot longer than I assumed it would, including a miscarriage, and caused a lot more emotional pain than I expected. Childbirth recovery also took longer than expected: sleep deprivation really got to me from about 3-8 weeks postpartum, and I was frustrated when I still wasn’t back to my pre-pregnancy body or exercise after 5 months. Getting daycare was uncertain and stressful (and expensive), and once I got full-time daycare it was a lot less reliable than I expected (because of Covid, but also kids just get sick all the time). All of these challenges are real and legitimate, and yet I also know that many people go through much more difficult experiences at each of these stages. I feel so fortunate to be able to experience growing and feeding a baby with my body, bonding with a new human, and watching them develop.* As my friend Seeta told me: being a parent is just the best.
So, given that the process of becoming a parent will most likely be filled with both joy and challenges, what steps can you take to prepare for these personal and professional changes?
For me, a big part of the process was setting goals and boundaries. I knew that I wanted to take a relatively long stretch of uninterrupted parental leave after both of my children were born (4-6 months; a privilege I had access to because of a supportive tenure-track position**). I knew there were grants, manuscripts, PhD student milestones, and other projects that I wanted to finish before going on maternity leave. I worked backwards from those goals to figure out what was feasible to accomplish during pregnancy, aiming to have everything critical finished one month before my due date and everything else done two weeks in advance. My goal was to ensure that I wasn’t the main limiting factor on anyone else’s work while I was on leave, so that in turn I could expect not to have any major work obligations and could solely focus on the baby and recovery.
This proved incredibly helpful for me and for lab members. I pre-wrote recommendation letters and grants that were due during the period I was on leave and gave them to administrative staff to submit later. I met with all lab members to discuss their plans and goals for the period I was on leave, including strategies for journal submission and seeking outside mentorship. I arranged with a senior postdoc to take on extra mentorship and administrative responsibilities in exchange for supplemental pay. I wrote supplement applications for my research grants to help keep our projects going (see below). I worked with the senior postdoc and admin staff to prepare grant annual reports that would come due while I was on leave. I met with future incoming lab members to discuss their plans and interests and introduce them to peers, staff, and mentors who could help assist with their transitions. My lab worked together to create a handbook describing our mission, values, culture, expectations, and day-to-day information to help make the environment more inclusive and welcoming for new lab members. I wrote up a guide on “what to expect when your advisor is expecting” and sent it out to all lab members to communicate expectations for while I was on leave on how and when I wanted them to contact me, managing co-authorship and journal submission, submitting recommendation letter requests to admin staff, who to contact for non-essential requests, and my timeline for returning to work. Together, we pushed to get papers and grants submitted and milestones met before I went on leave so they could be off our desks while I was out. I communicated with my collaborators about my timeline and what I expected to accomplish before my leave and after my return. All of this was a major collaborative effort that involved lots of proactive communication.
I have also made it a priority to make sure our lab maintains a sense of community while I’m out. We established expectations for continuing weekly lab meetings and other key (typically in-person) community activities like journal clubs and lunches while I’m gone. We established a lab buddy system that has been running since my first maternity leave, in which people are paired up each quarter to check in once a week to talk science, grad school, and life, making sure everyone has someone else in the lab who is aware of how they’re doing. We also established an active lab Slack workspace, where we do most of our communication in a fun and informal setting, celebrating each other’s successes, creating a forum to casually ask questions and share information, and chatting through direct messages. While on leave, it’s great to be able to check in on the lab on my own time without having to dig into a stressful overflowing email inbox.
To meet my own goals, I prioritized saying no to non-essential new commitments in the months leading up to my leave. This is not to say that I didn’t do any service or take on new projects, but I tried to carefully consider all invitations for reviews, panels, travel, committees, grants, projects, and guest lectures and to say yes to only the ones most important to me and to the goals of my lab and community. When to return to work travel is a particularly tricky decision, especially for lactating, primary, and solo parents. I had seen friends return to work travel as early as two months postpartum, traveling with infants or pumping throughout the trips, and while it was possible, it seemed very difficult, and I decided it was not a high priority for me. My intention was to wait until somewhere between seven and nine months postpartum (when I expected breastfeeding to be winding down) before resuming travel, but the pandemic started after seven months, so I ended up waiting over 2 ½ years and was pregnant with my second by the time I started traveling again (and never got back to traveling internationally). This time around I plan to resume travel somewhere between 6-12 months after birth.***
Finally, not to bury the lede but it is important to know that federal grant agencies (NSF and NIH) offer supplements to PIs of existing grants (including graduate and postdoctoral fellowships) who go on parental leave. NSF offers up to $30,000 direct costs usable during the leave through the Career-Life Balance Supplement program. NIH offers up to $50,000 direct costs that are usable for up to the first year through this program. In both cases, applications include short statements justifying how the funding will be spent and some of the documents from the original (parent) grant, which go through administrative review. The process has no deadlines and begins with contacting the program officer for the parent grant to let them know you plan to apply. The administrative review process can take some time so it’s helpful to start early. Funding is intended to help maintain the productivity of your projects while you’re out, including hiring personnel, paying to outsource key tasks, and ordering additional equipment and supplies to make research more efficient. I found it very helpful to get sample applications from others (I heard about the NIH supplement program through this thread, and Amy Goldberg kindly shared her successful proposal with me), and I’m happy to share mine if you reach out. These are great programs, but unfortunately they’re only available as supplements to existing grants, and there is no support (that I know of) available to those seeking their first grants who go on leave.
In sum, I agree with the maxim that there’s no one right time to become a parent. People vary widely in career paths, personal circumstances, and professional and personal support. All of these factor into the decision of whether and when to have children. For me, it was possible to wait until I was relatively well-established (5 years in) as an assistant professor in a job I loved and had made lots of local friends before having my first child. All of that helped me feel confident that research progress would continue, that lab members wouldn’t flounder, and that I had social support during a period that can be isolating. This gave me confidence to take a relatively longer leave, even though I was pre-tenure during my first birth. I hope this information is helpful to others thinking about becoming parents while on the tenure track by outlining some ways to CC the C (consciously control the controllable) amidst the many things you can’t.
*I know there are many paths to parenthood that are all meaningful and important; this one is mine, and I do not at all mean to diminish others’ experiences.
**I recognize that many don’t have access to this, which is a critical area where US policy needs to change. At the same time, this is much shorter than the 6-12 months that is standard in many other countries.
***I could see this timing varying a lot based on circumstances such as career stage and the need to travel for field work or the job market. I had a few years pre-tenure as an assistant professor to travel to lots of conferences and seminars before pregnancy, so I felt like it was okay to take a break. I was surprised how much time it freed up to focus on other important things like writing, research, and mentorship.